I imagine that it's both exhilarating to have reached such a high score (and shattered your previous record), and tantalizing to have gotten closer than ever to the ultimate goal. I think a million is going to happen.

Yep, everything up to Dreamcast. We count gameplay on all platforms released before 2000, so Dreamcast and N64 are fair game, but not PS2 or GBA.

We don't have any WonderSwan players, but if we did they'd be in the odd position of having their B&W games be eligible, but not their color games. (The WonderSwan was released in 1999, the WonderSwan Color in 2000.)

As you can see, I didn't play a lot this week, mainly caused by the TI-99 meeting on Tuesday and another follow-up meeting on Wednesday. I also couldn't really think of a game I'd like to play, instead I started on a new TI-99 homebrew called "Taxi Crossing", but I haven't played that because it's not playable yet.

Munchalot Man is some sort of Pac-Man clone in Batari Basic. It has a maze construction feature, but the mazes built with it aren't allowed to be very complex. This is still a WIP, so we'll see what will get out of it.

Hex Empire is a strategy game on hexagonal fields where you have to crush three enemies by tactically placing and moving your armies and attacking the enemies. It's a bit like "Risk" or "Defender of the crown".

I'd never really played Rastan Saga II before, but beat it this week after only 90 minutes of total gameplay. Lousy game.

I also beat Kolibri on Easy, and was generally unimpressed. The controls are lousy, the scrolling obnoxious, and key gameplay elements are unnecessarily obscure. Still, it was pretty straightforward once I figured out what I was meant to do, and most of the game's vaunted "puzzles" really amount to "find a wallbreaker, break wall, repeat".

On a happier note, my girlfriend and I made it to the last boss of Gain Ground on Easy, and had a blast getting there. Great game. Unfortunately that final boss is ridiculously hard, with heat-seeking missiles that seemed almost impossible to avoid. I guess we'll have to literally bring an army to beat it.

I also started on Super Hydlide, a game I suspected I'd like despite its poor reputation, particularly since I'm one of the few who enjoyed the original Hydlide for NES. Well, it took a little getting used to the game's crude graphics (or really, crude animation), and the initial learning curve was rough for the first 30-45 minutes, but once I started getting the hang of the gameplay it turned out to be good fun.

It reminds me a bit of Faery Tale Adventure, in that day/night and food/no food cycles are quite important, though Super Hydlide adds item weight and carrying capacity to the equation -- and getting caught far from home in an overloaded state is rough! I couldn't figure out why I kept ending up barely able to move, only to realize that I was carrying...ten clubs. Whoops.

I also kept getting lost, but mapping out the overworld helped, since it's only an 8x8 grid (though with offset wraparound). I've only gotten a small ways into the first dungeon (which isn't really a dungeon since it doesn't require a lamp); my understanding is that there are at least a few more, though I don't know where they'd be hidden unless there's another overworld area.

Finally, I beat another handful of levels in Qbillion, and tried out the Spider-Man/X-Men Game Boy port in emulation. It's not that bad, but obviously can't remotely compare to the original, and doesn't control as well either.

This week I revisited "Donkey Kong Jr." and "Donkey Kong 3". After that I played the NES version of "Donkey Kong 3" to compare it to the arcade version. Some of the sprites are identical, but use different colors since on the NES there's a limit of 4 sprite pallettes and 4 background pallettes. Also, they cut some gimmicks and game elements, for instance, the swarms of little insects flying around the nests, or the dying player being surrounded by insects. The sound effects have also been cut and simplified, due to the fact that the arcade version uses 2 NES sound chips, but the NES itself of course only has one of them. Extra lives are given only once at 50,000 points vs. the arcade at every 30,000 points. The absence of the swarms reminds me a bit of the Atari 2600 version of Gyruss missing the alien formation in the center, but admittedly, the swarms don't take as prominent a role as the formation in Gyruss, and also the graphics degradation isn't quite as drastic as on the 2600.

After having played Donkey Kong 3 on the NES, I revisited the NES version of Burgertime, which, oddly, has been made by NAMCOT rather than Data East and is much harder than the arcade original.

I checked out some demos for the Atari 2600. Brkanoid is an interesting Breakout variation reminding of Arkanoid, but without the moving enemies. The 50 sprite demo basically looks a lot like Asteroids, but is unplayable. And Sonic 2600 is a tech demo on how to do Sonic the hedgehog on the Atari 2600, which is also pretty unplayable as an actual game as I found out. I'm not entirely sure if Sonic 2600 and the 50 sprite demo should actually be counted as games...

No prizes for guessing that I just got a Cuttle Cart 3 (hence all the trying-out of rare Intellivision games). Otherwise, I've been trying to finish up Super Hydlide, which turned into a bit of a slog because of a couple very obscure roadblocks.

Well, I should have been playing Lynx Klax for the HSC, but sadly, I didn't get to it this week.

Arcade:

Ms. Pac-Man - 3 hours. I'm getting pretty good at this. The 4th map is actually easier than the 3rd one.Star Force - 5 min.Crazy Kong II (Alternate Levels) - 15 min. A pretty retarded hack of a hack.Super Bug - 5 min. I actually have a very faint recollection of playing this game back in the arcade when I was very, very little. Though for some reason I remember the screen being black and green instead of black and white. I don't know why.Lunar Rescue - 5 min.Gun Fight - 5 min. From 1975, the oldest game MAME plays. It actually wouldn't be a bad game with 2 players and the original controls. Could be fun. I wonder if there's still a working cabinet anywhere.

Neo-Geo (does this count as "Arcade" category or what? I was playing it in MAME):

Star Force - 5 min. The Famicom version is different from the NES version. Apparently the NES version received some upgrades to graphics and sound. The ROM size appears to be about double as well in the NES version.

SG-1000:

Star Force - 5 min.

I didn't get much of a chance to play them yet, but I've set up Star Force in my emulators to compare them across some different systems. Hopefully I'll get a chance to do that this week. It should be interesting. They were all released around the same time ~ '85.